“The Status of the Classics: A View from Today” (comment on Donald Levine, “The Variable Status of the Classics in Differing Narratives of the Sociological Tradition”)

Toward a Historical Sociology of Canonization: Comparing the Development of Sociological Theory in the English-, German-, and French-Language Contexts since the 1950s

“…French textbooks stand out in prioritizing concepts over paradigms, like for example, symbolic interactionism or conflict theory, which are more common in the German and English contexts. Overall, these results confirm the predominance of contextualism in the Anglophone sphere [Owens 2015], while suggesting that this approach is to some degree bound up with the peculiarities of the local institutional dynamics reviewed above. The theorists discussed also vary regionally, though they share key points of reference.…”

“…But the form remains the same as contextualism spans both defenders [Baehr 2017] and critics of the traditional canon [Connell 2007]. Perhaps for this reason, English-language textbooks have proven highly responsive to the social and political changes in the field: contextualism is infinitely expansible [Owens 2015]. Accordingly, as the disciplinary context has shifted sharply in the direction of critical, postcolonial, and feminist theory, these and similar ideas have been steadily incorporated into the historical story of the field, along with a growth in the representation of women theorists.…”

“…Others reinterpreted the discipline’s formative years as marked by ideological responses to the progressive forces of history [Zeitlin 1968] driven by class politics, patriarchy, imperialism, and racial domination [Aßmann and Stollberg 1974; Connell 1997; Go 2020; Gouldner 1980]. 8 Owens [2015] even suggests this contextualist perspective has come to dominate the American field, especially in elite programs. For their part, humanists resisted the synthetic narrative by arguing for the fundamental incommensurability of the viewpoints represented by classical authors [Alexander 1987], and held up the classics as an enduring counterpoint to the field’s tendency to lose its way in narrow empirical concerns or conceptual wordplay.…”

“…First, we review debates about the status of “classics, canons, and founders” [Baehr 2017; Barlösius 2004] in sociological theory, 2 with a view to how these debates have unfolded in recent English, German, and French discussions. Here we highlight the extent to which particular stances on how to teach sociological theory reflect broader “visions of the sociological tradition,” approaches to organizing its material whether in terms of authors, concepts, or paradigms, and major patterns of institutional development across and within English, German, and French sociology [Levine 1995; Owens 2015; Turner 1990]. We also discuss the strengths and limits of past assessments of whether there is a canon, who is in it, how it is structured, and how it has varied across time and place.…”